During an install, I had entered an 8-char root password twice and moved on
to later screens, when I remembered something I needed to change from an
earlier screen.  "Back" worked fine to get me there; I made the change and
started OK'ing screens to move forward again.

When I got to the root password screen again, the fields appeared blank, so
the dilemma is:  is there something there or not?  I assumed not, so I
entered the 8-char root password again.

When the install was done and upon reboot, the 8-char password didn't work,
but if I repeated it (16 chars) it worked correctly.  Clearly the previous
entry was in the buffer when I returned to the screen, but there was no way
to know that.

It seems to me that password fields should display *'s for each character,
so you can see if the field is empty or not.  If not, then I think the
fields should be cleared upon revisiting the screen.  If neither of these,
confusion will result, and the user may end up locked out of the root
account.